Emulating Petaflops Machines and Blue Gene
Authors:
Neelam Saboo, Arun Kumar Singla, Joshua Mostkoff Unger, L.V. Kale
Parallel Programming Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Workshop on Massively Parallel Processing (IPDPS'01)
Petaflops-class computers, based on the current or foreseeable CMOS generation, appear to be feasible in the near future. An emulator for a petaflops-class programming environment is necessary to facilitate offline development and debugging of applications, and exploration of programming models. Such an emulator must be able to run on large traditional parallel machines. This paper describes the design and implementation of an emulator for a class of petaflops machines. The machine parameters can be varied to cover a variety of possible architectures within this class, although our current implementation is influenced by (and is targeted to emulate) an initial design of the Blue Gene Machine being developed by IBM. Our implementation is based on Charm++, an object-based message-driven parallel execution model, which allows emulation of multiple Blue Gene nodes to a single physical processor. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by emulating short million-processor programs on less than a hundred processors of the ASCI-Red machine.